Peter asked around about whether the visits from the polar vortex have led to unusually early lake freezes. The answer is basically no. He found that we're really just having a good old-fashioned winter like those many may remember (correctly or not) from their childhoods.

Here's what he discovered:

"George Leshkevich is a researcher at NOAA's Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory. He says you have to go back about 25 years to find this amount of ice in the Great Lakes this early but he says it is not unusual.

" 'In comparison to the last few years this is quite a bit more,' he says. 'In comparison to winters in the 70s and 80s, this is not that anomalous.' "

But whether or not the lakes' current conditions are all that remarkable, that photo still makes us shiver.